Re: LaTeX & DFSG
> From: Jeff Licquia <licquia@debian.org>
> Date: 18 Jul 2002 18:30:19 -0500
>
> No, not at all. I think that your R3 right is the point of contention;
> we do not believe that the draft of the LPPL we've seen confers that
> right.
This is exactly the reason of this discussion.
I hope that the intention of the LPPL is clear now. As far as I can
see, some people here do not agree with this intention, while the
majority seems to be in favor on it. The question is now in the exact
wording that would express this intention in the form acceptable to
the majority of the Debian community.
> Let's take an example that will likely resonate with typesetters a bit
> more: the euro. How did you arrange to add the euro symbol to TeX and
> LaTeX? What would have happened if I would have needed a euro symbol
> before it was added?
>
This is a technical question, so please excuse my rather technical
answer. On the other hand this answer might be instructive in the way
(La)TeX works and why we do not want to change the kernel.
Ok, suppose you want to add a euro symbol to your document. Old
documents do not mention euro, so I can assume we have a new document.
The euro symbol is a lettershape. A collection of lettershapes is
called a font (please do not tell anybody I told you this:
typographers will crucify me for the oversimplification). Now the base
font of your document might either have euro or not. Let us consider
these possibilities.
Suppose that your document uses a font which has euro. To use a font,
LaTeX must read a bunch of text files that provide font descriptions
(.fd files) and font encodings (.def files). Since your font has euro,
then a line in one of these files tells LaTeXL: "I have a strange
letter called euro symbol, which can be accessed by the command
\euro". After this LaTeX happily typesets the phrase "I can buy this
CD in London for \pounds5, but in Paris it costs \euro10".
Now suppose your base font does NOT have euro. To make this case more
interesting, suppose you use Computer Moder fonts, which have no euro
by licensing reasons: Knuth does not allow anybody to change them, and
he seems to be not interested in their modification himself. Well, you
cannot add euro to CM fonts, but absolutely nothing prevents you to
use an additional font in your document. You can actually make your
own font with just one letter euro and encapsulate all font switching
in a single command. Now the command \euro will mean "switch from the
current font to the 'eurofont', typeset euro symbol and switch
back". You *may* do this, but probably you would not want it because
it is already done by Ron McDonnel, the author of eurofont package. As
far as I understand, his program scans the fonts installed on your
system and picks the most proper euro symbol to include in the
documents that use euro-less fonts. So you can just add to your
document "\usepackage{eurofont}", and then euro becomes magically
accessible.
You might decide that this run-time patching of CM fonts is not
convenient. It is probably not a problem for just one symbol, but it
*is* a problem when you need many patches. There are several
solutions. One was employed by the American Mathematical Society (btw,
they are the holders of the TeX trademark). When they found that
Knuthian fonts do not include many symbols that mathematicians need,
they comissioned a font designer to make a collection of these symbols
(and made them freely available to the community -- by the way, you
distribute this collection too). You add these collections by the
command "\usepackage{amsfonts}" (the story is even more interesting,
but I want to keep this short). Another was chosen by European users,
who needed better kerning, diacritics and additional letters. For this
purpose J"org Knappen completely redesigned CM fonts and produced
European Computer Modern (EC) fonts, also distributed by Debian. These
fonts are used by many non-US TeX users.
Well, as you see, this community has its own way of modifying
programs. We have traditions that predate GPL, Linux and even C. We
are quite happy with the way the things are.
--
Good luck
-Boris
<jim> Lemme make sure I'm not wasting time here... bcwhite will remove
pkgs that havent been fixed that have outstanding bugs of severity
"important". True or false?
<JHM> jim: "important" or higher. True.
<jim> Then we're about to lose ftp.debian.org and dpkg :)
* netgod will miss dpkg -- it was occasionally useful
<Joey> We still have rpm....
-- Seen on #Debian
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: